little
Bushmen in his employ, they came to a deep water-hole, where the
precious fluid, though "brak" (alkaline) and stagnant, was still
plentiful and drinkable, and within working distance of which the
newly-discovered "fields" were located. Here the dunes were
interspersed with long narrow "aars," covered with fine gravel and
loose stones, and here and there covered with scrubby vegetation.

Within a few days Sydney had to acknowledge that his first conclusion
that there was not a single honest man in the party besides himself,
was an unjust one, for the harmless and most necessary professor of
geology was a notable exception.

Absorbed in his science, he passed most of his time in his tent poring
over a microscope, taking very little heed, apparently, of what was
going on, and he was obviously without guile and likely to be easily
gulled by even the most transparent roguery. And that the others were
rogues Dick grew more and more convinced, and it would have been hard
to say which of the party he detested the more; Gilderman, the suave
Johannesburg expert, glib, well-dressed and fastidious; Jelder, the
syndicate's expert from the same locality, a rough-voiced, domineering
mining engineer; Zweiter and Spattboom, the "financial" men; or Junes
and Grosman, the two prospectors. On the whole, he thought, were he a
free agent, he would have picked a quarrel with each and all of them
for the sake of giving them individually a thrashing, and in that case
the immaculate Gilderman would have been his first choice.

Each and all of them spoke English, and professed that nationality, but
Dick soon decided that, with the possible exception of Junes, what
wasn't German of the party was certainly Jew!

But still to all appearance everything was fair and above-board. The
prospectors would point out the most likely spots to try for diamonds,
the Ovampo boys would be set to work, and almost invariably they found
diamonds. Occasionally one or other of the "experts" would suggest a
different spot, and usually these sapient individuals would justify
their reputation by finding diamonds also in these spots.

The syndicate's expert was jubilant, the company's expert apparently
well satisfied, and the professor beamed upon the stones as they came
from the sieve, talked learnedly of their origin and the peculiarities
of the deposit they were found in, and passed a great deal of time in
abstruse calculations as to the probable yield of t